For those of you who weren't aware, my friend Noah is closing up his online photography print shop on January 1. If you want a print of his work, hop over to noahgrey.com/photography to nab one.

Some of you might even remember that I was in his 2003 gallery. Look closely and you'll see two photos of me available on that page.

My entries from my trip out to visit him are here. My favorite is one he shot that he's never made available for sale:

[Contemplation on flickr.]

I've mentioned this off and on, but today is the day!  In a few hours, we'll pick up the giant 4x4 needed to ascend to the summit of Mauna Kea.

Call this the 'before' photo:

[Original: 'Where I'll be tonight' on flickr]

For those of you totally geeking out on this harebrained scheme, a map of the telescopes at the summit and a map of where all this goodness is on the Big Island, anyway.  Both are from the Mauna Kea Weather Center.

What we're expecting:

If I had to guess, I was six. Maybe. Too young for such things at the time, too young for such things even now, in an age of technologized children. I was young, and my memories took longer than most to root, so I do not remember a time when I did not know the inner workings of a camera.

I got my new toy last night -- the Nikon 20mm f/2.8 wide-angle lens. We're still sniffing each other and making friends, but Wendy was nice enough to let me shoot three photos of her over lunch today that give a pretty good idea of how different the world appears through each of these lenses.

This entry is partly to test a code fix and partly to grin at the results of this morning's photography.

BJ is a favorite and consistent photo subject of mine. I got an excellent headshot of her for a print piece I worked on a couple of months ago, but I had to cut her photo out of the finished piece due to space constraints. It made me sad, because her photo was excellent; it was just trumped by two better photos.

This morning, she saw my camera bag and said, "Think you'll need another shot of me sometime soon?" I told her that I might, but that it would be for a very different project.

The standard life photos go up a lot faster than my version of the 365 Library Days project. I know from watching the other photos posted to the photo pool that what I'm doing is very different from what the other participants are doing. I'm not sure if my version quite qualifies as subverting the intent, or celebrating it in a different way.

I board a plane for the Beer and Cheese Tour of Seattle at six a.m. next Thursday.

(Have you guys noticed over the past few years that every trip, project, etc. always seems to get a title after it's been in my life a while? By naming it, I bring it into existence. Or something.)

…is a lovely thing indeed.

I'm not sure why I like working in black and white better than I like working in color, but it's always been that way for me. It's not unlike drawing - by subtracting the inessential, you're left with only the subject's essence.

If you want stellar photography, go visit Noah's place for a while. Me, I snap things that show up in my life, things that make me laugh or remember or just sum up life in general. That, and the cats have no problem whatsoever in posing for the camera, given that they're attention-hogging little catsluts when it's just the three of us in the house.

So here's what life has been like for the cats since we got our new digital camera:

If you haven't seen the Library of Congress' exhibit 'The Empire That Was Russia'—The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Revealed, then you should take the time to look at it.

Before you do, though, read up on the process. A short summary: a photographer travelled around Russia in the 1910s ('nineteen-teens' if you're my grandmother), photographing everything from royalty to commoners to landscapes to architecture.The incredible thing is the medium he used—a camera with three filters, which provided him three photographic plates. One red, one green, one blue. He apparently had a stereoscope-like contraption that allowed him to project his images back together into one color photograph for others to view.